Indy's Blog

A new window film from Designtex takes its cues from science fiction.

Open offices are privacy nightmares, especially if you’re trying to hide sensitive data on screens. But since open offices aren’t going away any time soon, there’s Casper: a new product from the applied materials company Designtex that works like a cloaking device.

When applied to a glass wall or a window, Casper blacks out screens behind it. The transparent window film blocks light waves transmitted through LCD and LED screens. This makes them look like they’re turned off. Everything else in the room looks completely normal. While privacy screens have existed for laptops and individual monitors for quite sometime, Casper brings it to the architectural scale. It’s like a Romulan cloaking device come to life.

A young Fort Worth architecture firm is about to put its design mark on the city.

Soon, Matthijs and Jie Melchiors, partners and founders of MEL/ARCH studio, will start construction on a three-story office building made entirely of shipping containers. In all, 40 containers of various colors will be used. It’s expected to be completed in October.

In all, the building will have space for 30 businesses. There will also be a break room, restrooms and common areas.

The building will be 15,000 square feet, with each office about 160 square feet. The containers are 8 feet by 20 feet, but they are 12 inches taller than the typical container size.

The building will have solar panels on the roof and tree sculptures on an outdoor deck that are really wind turbines that will generate supplemental power to the building.

In one recent study, two-thirds of employees said their favorite coworkers were in another location.

Last year, Ann Herrmann, who heads up a talent management firm, made her entire workforce remote. They now rely on a combination of videoconferencing tools and chat platforms, with an annual face-to-face retreat. So far, she says, she’s “actually gotten to know my employees better in the process of going 100% virtual.”

By beaming into countless home offices for video-based meetings day in and day out, and encouraging employees to share aspects of their home-based work, “Surprisingly, working remotely gives me a chance to really know our employees on a personal level, because we often disclose more about the world we live and work in than we did when we were colocated,” says Herrmann.

Herrmann might be onto something. In a recent study by the communications company Polycom, which covered over 25,000 workers across 12 countries, 66% said their favorite colleague isn’t located in their own office but in another one far away.

Long-Distance (Working) Relationships

How come? As Herrmann points out, when you’re working remotely with no one else around, there’s often an impetus to make more personal connections. And with digital technologies facilitating the interaction, there may be less anxiety about sharing the more private side of your life with somebody you don’t see in the flesh. We already know through other research that authenticity matters in the workplace, and that it’s something people tend to struggle with. So it’s not hard to see how remote conversations can sometimes fulfill that need more readily.

Remember the recent viral BBC video of that professor’s live interview from his home office getting crashed by his two young kids? It’s not just that we’re often sharing more intimate details verbally with remote colleagues, it’s that we’re seeing a more personal side, too. As Herrmann notes, videoconferencing into team members’ home offices lets her “see what’s important to our employees, from a banjo prominently displayed near an employee’s desk, to photos of family and pets.”

Plus, so much of what we communicate is nonverbal—often more than we realize. And body language and facial expressions tend to come across just as powerfully on video as they do in person, so just because you’re speaking to a colleague remotely doesn’t mean there’s automatically more social or emotional distance between you.

There is a fear of remote-work tools and policies, though. Many companies don’t implement them well, and wind up building virtual fences that hurt their projects’ success and limit accountability. When that happens, many employers think twice about going remote. Yahoo, in perhaps the best-known example, scrapped its remote-working policy in 2013 and maintained years afterward that that was the right move.

To be sure, every company is different. But in the drive to maximize productivity, employers shouldn’t overlook the human element. Relationships matter, and there’s ample evidence that those between colleagues can be just as strong—if not stronger—across time zones and continents as they can across a cubicle wall. If you like someone, you’re more likely to work well with them and pull together in a crisis, no matter where they are.

Passengers on foreign airlines headed to the United States from 10 airports in eight majority-Muslim countries have been barred from carrying electronic devices larger than a cellphone under a new flight restriction enacted on Tuesday by the Trump administration.

Officials called the directive an attempt to address gaps in foreign airport security, and said it was not based on any specific or credible threat of an imminent attack.

The Department of Homeland Security said the restricted items included laptop computers, tablets, cameras, travel printers and games bigger than a phone. The restrictions would not apply to aircraft crews, officials said in a briefing to reporters on Monday night that outlined the terms of the ban.

The new policy took effect at 3 a.m. E.D.T. on Tuesday, and must be followed within 96 hours by airlines flying to the United States from airports in Amman, Jordan; Cairo; Istanbul; Jeddah and Riyadh in Saudi Arabia; Kuwait City; Casablanca, Morocco; Doha, Qatar; and Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

It applies only to flights on foreign carriers, and not American-operated airlines. Officials did not say how long the ban would remain in place or if other airports would be added.